Richard Filing

Techcrunch fans would have seen this great article that describes the migration, not from web pages to locations as is commonly thought, but from pages to streams.

Excerpt: The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface. Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere, search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool.

Read the complete ‘Jump into the Stream’ post

It’s so easy to wander around the web scoring sometimes but mainly wasting time. Chris Brogan provides some great suggestions on how to maintain focus, broaden horizons and make productive use of some of the key tools and services on the internet. Here’s ten of them in my favourite personal knowledge management theme:

Streams of Information

1. Think about FriendFeed as your own personal newsroom or communications center.
2. Revisit Reddit as a news source, and also as a roll-your-own tool for information clustering.
3. Use Alltop as an idea-starter, or as competitive analysis of content spaces.
4. Cook up six powerful searches on Twitter Search and add those RSS outputs to your feed reader.
5. Visit Slideshare weekly and search for new presentations to learn from.
6. Use YouTube as a source for lectures and learning. Use Magnify as a curation tool.
7. Rediscover what’s interesting in Delicious/Popular. Go back and find tags that matter more to you.
8. Reconsider your current blog reading list. Do some quick math. If it is more than 60% related to your industry, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Find the outliers.
9. Pick at least one news source from outside your country to monitor information from a different perspective. One of my sources is The Guardian.
10. Subscribe to at least one blog with a strong opposing view. Learn from it. Learn where your position is different. Learn how they say what they say successfully. Discover what has impact and what doesn’t.

Read the full post at chrisbrogan.com

Ravit Lichtenberg at Read Write Web has a go at the coming evolution of social media.

Excerpt: Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people’s social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you’ll need to take into consideration in the coming year:
1. It’s About People
2. Creating Meaning and Value
3. Enabling Convergence
4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience
5. Creating Relevant Social Networks
6. Innovating in the Advertising Space
7. Helping People Organize Their “Old” Social Media Ecosystem
8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World
9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs
10. Making Money

Read Ravit’s full post here

As someone always trying out these things with diminishing expectations, my take on this is that Friendfeed is very close to getting it as right as possible and some sort of cloud based integration with storage, reference, lifestreaming (such as Evernote) wouild cap the whole thing off. My big problem is the disappearance of community and personal knowledge in social media due to age rather than relevance.

Choosing a key notetaking application is no small matter for an obsessive like me. For a long time I used Texnotes and similar nesting tree based solutions.

I tried Evernote when it first started out but didn’t like the emphasis on the timeline navigation. Recently I returned on the strength of the updated desktop client and the great reviews the iPhone app kept receiving. Evernote synchronises from any internet connected client and if there’s no connection the update is held in a pending state.

As the number of my imported notes increased, navigation was no problem, the tagging and search filters are very well implemented - I use Evernote every day and highly recommend it.
Read about Evernote desktop and iPhone here

In this excellent commentary, Tim O’Reilly describes how he sees three types of cloud computing:

1. Utility computing ie. the Amazon API
   
2. Platform as a Service ie. Salesforce.com
   
3. Cloud-based end-user applications ie. Facebook, Linkedin etc
   

Then he discusses how power laws work in the online environment:

Excerpt: Understanding the dynamics of increasing returns on the web is the essence of what I called Web 2.0. Ultimately, on the network, applications win if they get better the more people use them. As I pointed out back in 2005, Google, Amazon, ebay, craigslist, wikipedia, and all other other Web 2.0 superstar applications have this in common

Read the complete article here

I subscribe to Fast Forward’s RSS feed and here’s another good reason why - it originates from a NY Times article - If the US State Department Can Use Wikis and Blogs Effectively, So Can Your Organization ?
Excerpt: I came across a recent NY Times article about the growing use of wikis and blogs within the US State Department, an organization that clearly has interest in controlling its messages AND in understanding better how to use information, knowledge and brainpower to be effective. Read in full here

Great story in INC Mag’s March issue about Blogger.com and Twitter founder Evan Williams
Excerpt: Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message–we resolve to push back the meeting slightly–and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: “Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave.”
Read the entire story here

How good does version 2 of delicious look?
Techcrunch have screen shots and feature overview of the Delicious 2.0 Preview